Gisela Stuart: Best Way to Ensure Workers & Women’s Rights is to Have a Parliament That is Directly Accountable to the People

LONDON – England – Responding to a pro-EU TUC report, Gisela Stuart MP, Chair of the Vote Leave, has revealed how the EU has been detrimental to workers and women’s rights.

“The UK has led the way in promoting and protecting workers rights, and it’s deeply misleading to suggest that leaving the EU would put them at risk.

“The best way to ensure that workers rights are to protected is to have a parliament that is directly accountable to the people; in other words, to put power back in people’s hands. The EU prevents that, and means that unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats canimpose rules and regulations that the British people have no say over.

“On 23 June we have the opportunity to take back control of our country and our democracy, as well as the £350 million we send to Brussels every week, by voting to leave the EU.”

Protection of Women’s Rights is not contingent on EU membership

Before we joined the EU:

In 1961 the contraceptive pill was made free and ‘available to all’ on the NHS, giving women more control.

Impact on family finances: The independent House of Commons Library has concluded that EU membership increases the costs of consumer goods, stating that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy ‘artificially inflates food prices’ and that ‘consumer prices across a range of other goods imported from outside the EU are raised as a result of the common external tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade imposed by the EU. These include footwear (a 17% tariff), bicycles (15% tariff) and a range of clothing (12% tariff)’.

The VAT Directivealso requires the charging to VAT of domestic supplies of fuel and power. The 1997 Labour Party Manifesto stated that ‘the tragedy is that those hardest hit are least able to pay. That is why we strongly opposed the imposition of VAT on fuel.‘ However, the party could only pledge to ‘cut VAT on fuel to five per cent, the lowest level allowed‘. When the Labour Party proposed a reduced rate of 17.5% VAT on petrol in 2011, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Justine Greening, said that EU law does ‘not permit a reduced rate or exemption to be applied to transport fuel’, and that renegotiating EU VAT rules could take as much as six years.